Mexican Beasts and Living Santos.

Mexican Beasts and Living Santos, by the agency of Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes. powerHouse Books/144 pp/$1800 (hb) meeting-house of Confessions is a documentation of the eponymous collaborative performance, installation and exhibition as well as an expansion of the universals and concerns that were its impetus. The first presentation of "Temple of Confessions" was in 1994 at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts in Arizona and in the following sum of two units years it was presented in diverse settings including the Detroit Institute for the Arts and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC as well as city festivals and a seventeenth-century monastery in Mexico.

In an essay about the cast Gomez-Pena writes that the collaborators "became brace living santos [saints] from an unknown border religion, in search of sanctuary across America." The installation consisted of three spaces: the Chapel of Desires, the Chapel of Fears and a chamber in the middle, forming a sort of spiritual and cultural meeting-house The temple acted as a participatory pseudo-ethnic diorama and religious display. In the Chapel of Desires Sifuentes sat in a Plexiglas coachman's seat dressed as a "holy" gang member, "El Pre-Columbian Vato." His arms and face displayed pre-Columbian tattoos and he wore a bloodstained shirt, a bandanna through his head and large headphones. He held a fire-arm that he periodically cleaned with an American flag. Also inside the chest were several cockroaches, an iguana and a small table holding a variety of items so as drug paraphernalia and a can of spray paint. He sat in van of the facade of a "pre-Columbian temple" made gone out of Styrofoam that displayed a neon sign reading: "WE INCARNATE Y OUR DESIRES."

Opposite Sifuentes was another Plexiglas receptacle the Chapel of Fears, where Gomez-Pena sat intermittently upon a toilet bowl or in a wheelchair. He was costum in a "Tex-Mex Aztec outfit" as a futuristic shaman named "San Pocho Aztlaneca" and shared his case with an assortment of things including live crickets, taxidermied animals and a bound box. The large quantity of Mexican and Latin American artifacts and store-bought stereotype in the santos' Plexiglas boxe looks absurd, yet they are real. Above him hung a neon sign that read: "WE INCARNATE YOUR FEARS."

In face of both santos were unpliable church kneelers and microphones to record the confessions of viewers' intercultural fears and desires. Approximately individual third of the viewers admited Those too shy to speak into a microphone could write their confessions and leave them in an urn A toll-free number was also provided for viewers who wished to call in their confessions.

The third space, the "mortuary chapel" or "chamber," contained, among other things, a stiff Indian sculpture; a taxidermied cock hanging above a body in a dead body bag marked "COURTESY OF THE INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service]"; an aged church pew; and black velvety paintings of other living fictitious saints. After three days Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes left the meeting-house and were replaced by effigies of their characters. The installation continued for three weeks during which viewers could still confess

The artists were surprised from the quantity of the answers to the project and by dint of the emotion present in the viewers' confessions. by way of confronting viewers with a variety of authentic and powerful cultural stereotype and asking them to accord by confessing their cultural fears, desires, "sins" and speculations the artists tapped into the racial and ethnic prejudice, misunderstanding and hostility that a certain Americans feel toward Mexico, Chicanos and persons from other cultures.

Sifuentes also describes the reaction to the project: "most everyone is mesmerized by means of the images and the political make contented of the work and compell to stay for protracted periods of time--even those who hate it. What they reveal... toward Latinos, the Spanish language, immigration and urban violence is beginning to take shape as a barometer measuring the climate of racial intolerance in this land We have only begun to proces the convolutions of information we have gathered." about of the confessions are reprinted in the part They are divided into brace sections: intercultural desire and intercultural fear. The confessions are a mixture of the deep and the profane. Some are well-meaning and expres solidarity and empathy: "I desire for all of us to know and like each other." The most striking confessions reveal and document the widespread racism, xenophobia and prejudice against Mexican and Spanish American culture: "I am all for cultural diversity as extended as it doesn't raise taxes." "I desire that freaks like y ou stay in your little closets" "I badly want a Mexican woman." There is also a smattering of the scatological: "To behold the iguana go to the bathroom."

place of worship of Confessions also presents visual documentation of the cast and contains essays by anthropologist Roger Bartra and journalist ed Morales as well as sum of two units poems by Ruben Martinez. The volume is edifying, extending the life of Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes's delineate It also contains reproductions of the black soft paintings of "End-of-the-Century Saints" by the agency of Jorge T. that Gomez-Pena calls Conceptual soft Art. These paintings hung in the middle chamber of the house of god One image of "Santa Frida de Detroit" depicts a likeness of Frida Kahlo with a Uniroyal Tire as a halo, suggesting the influence of local political, social and economic issues.